About halfway through the building of Big Red, I received an email with some in-progress pictures. My wife reacted as I felt, awestruck, and said "the future is unwritten and wide open." It was a wondrous Zen wack for sure and I couldn't agree more. If there's conceptual and physical and visual manna on Earth, it might just be Big Red, a harp guitar of staggering architecture and graceful flow. Harp guitars were popular parlor and concert instruments in 18 and 1900s America. There's never been a definitive model, though oversized guitar with extra strings sums it up. Big Red has 38 of them. The baritone-length classical guitar neck has six strings over a fretless brass fingerboard in the lower register and fretting a fifth above the open notes. There's 12 sympathetics like the H'arpeggione has. Five sub-basses attached to an extension arm run roughly parallel to the main neck, and 15 super-trebles over the body ring zitheresque. Like the H'arp, Big Red's top is salvaged redwood, the neck+ is maple, and in a departure, the body is made of industrial papier-mache, imparting a topographic dimension. It's played upright. Big Red is delicate and heavy, a stately, yielding chorus of cords (and chords) held together by rare ingenuity, rootedness, and a winking eye to the new.